Scenes of Our Other Life
by RosaLui
Summary: He was Uchiha Sasuke, civilian boyfriend of the Hokage hopeful, but it would never erase the infamy of the other Uchiha Sasuke - ninja traitor, war criminal, and Naruto's dead asshole best friend. SasuNaru.


**A/N:** This is a very, very late timestamp fic for Ronsard. It can be read on its own, but is in the same 'verse as my post-apocalypse zombie AU fics, "Find You" and "Of Ninja and Ceilings and Lives Less Ordinary." For newcomers, all you need to know is that this has a canon Naruto and an AU Sasuke (canon Sasuke once was, but is no more). AU Sasuke is not a ninja.

Also, I apparently have a thing for Sasuke fighting people while underdressed.

* * *

It started on a windy day in May.

Sasuke was paying only vague attention to the conversation around him, as he often did, when it turned to shinobi shop talk and the technology of war. When he looked up, it had gone quiet. His four dinner companions - the usual, with Naruto on a mission - were watching him very closely.

Sasuke slowly lowered his chopsticks and tried to think of a dignified way to check for rice on his face.

"Sasuke," Sakura said in a bright voice, which was how he knew it was going to be Bad. "You remember Iruka-sensei, don't you?"

"Sure," he said. The affable teacher with the clean scar across his nose and constant crowd of yammering children often dropped by Naruto's apartment. Naruto acted like he had hung the moon.

Sasuke really hoped he wasn't dead.

"He's starting signups for adult Genin classes," Sakura continued, poking nervously at the table. She was attempting casual and failing. "He said you're welcome to drop by and watch a class or two, if you like."

"Watch," Sasuke said with narrowed eyes.

"Sure." The table was starting to crack slightly under pressure.

At the other end of the booth, Sakura's blonde friend rolled her eyes. "Stop lying to him." One of the many things to be appreciated about Ino Yamanaka was how quickly she'd gotten over Sasuke's miraculous not-really-return. She was now deeply unimpressed by him. "Just tell him you want him to enroll because you think someone will accidentally squish him like a bug."

"I can take care of myself," said Sasuke, completely aware that most five-year-olds in the village could punt him across the room.

"We know you can," Sakura said quickly. "We just think that the safety risk -"

"There's also a bet on about whether you're a prodigy like the other Uchiha," Sai interrupted. The smile on his face was more infuriating than usual.

"Yeah," Sasuke said, because he wasn't stupid and he heard things. "well, I'm not interest-"

"I've wagered a lot of money on this being untrue. I think you are a weakling," Sai continued, going back to his food.

"I'm not interested," Sasuke repeated loudly.

Sai hummed, unconvinced.

Sasuke turned to Kakashi, the only member of the party who had been silent thus far. "Talk sense into them."

"I think it's a very good idea," Kakashi said. "You live in a Hidden Village, you're the Hokage-in-training's boyfriend, you have a face that most of the ninja community hates on principle -"

"Thanks," Sasuke said with as much sarcasm as possible. "I'm still not joining a class for children."

"It's okay Sasuke," Kakashi said, looking at him seriously over the top of his mask. "Iruka-sensei won't let the little first-years bully you."

Sakura giggled into her teacup, and Sasuke felt a reluctant smile pull at his lips.

"It would be a separate class," Sakura said, smiling now. "Just adults - you'd be starting off at the same level as everyone else. And Naruto agrees with us, he really does, he just doesn't want to pressure you."

Sasuke imagined himself in a crowd of strangers, him with his infamous face and name. Everyone waiting to see if he turned into a brilliant ninja or humiliated himself.

"You were the other Sasuke's sensei," Sasuke said, looking at Kakashi with desperation. "Why can't you teach me?"

There was a sudden silence at the table.

"Aww, shit," said Ino. Then she slurped the rest of her spicy noodles, slapped some money on the counter, and stood up. "Right, that's my cue to go." Then she grabbed Sai by the back of his shirt and dragged him out the door, leaving the other three in awkward quiet.

The silence stretched as Sakura looked down at her plate.

"Sorry," Kakashi said finally. His voice was as light and casual. "I think one disastrous stint as my student is enough for a lifetime."

Then he was gone before Sasuke had even blinked.

A moment passed. Then, brushing a hand carefully across his shoulder - for her comfort or his - Sakura made her excuses and left as well.

In retrospect, Sasuke should have realized it was a stupid idea.

He was Uchiha Sasuke, civilian boyfriend of the Hokage hopeful, but it would never erase the infamy of the other Uchiha Sasuke - ninja traitor, war criminal, and Naruto's dead asshole best friend.

To hear others tell it, his preincarnation - or whatever - had been many things. Assholish, good-looking, single-minded, unhinged. Dead. Strangers bemoaned the loss of their prodigy even as they reviled the person he'd become. They wondered how such a sweet boy could have gone so wrong.

Sasuke the civilian thought maybe it had something to do with being raised in a village of professional killers who sent kids onto the battlefield, but no one asked him.

He was just left to bear the weight of all the bridges his doppelganger had burned, and should have realized that Kakashi wouldn't waste time repeating the experience. Besides, the Jounin was apparently one of the most high-ranked and prominent ninja in the village. He had better things to do than teach a civilian children's tricks.

A stupid idea.

Sasuke still wasn't going to take the kiddie class, though.

* * *

Two months went by. The flowers in the wood faded, the rains dried, and the brown roofs of Konoha grew sun-baked.

On a balmy July morning,Naruto was prodded from the land of sleep by summer light filtering through the curtains and the hum of cicadas out the window. A warm body was curled half under his, feet bare, sheets kicked to the floor sometime in the night. Soft breath was ruffling his hair.

Naruto opened his eyes. He and Sasuke were plastered to each other in a tangle of limbs. The latter was lying heavy with sleep, but a line of tension eased in his spine as Naruto swept one careful hand across his back.

Naruto, for all that he engaged in regular battles for a living, had the gift of collapsing into a happy boneless sprawl the instant he hit the bed. Sasuke, though, sometimes relived the terror of sleeping fitfully, weapon to hand, as undead hordes scraped at the gate. And before that, years of homelessness before Naruto found him again, living in local parks or internet cafes if he got lucky.

Naruto shifted to stare at the face smushed into the sheets near his own.

Sometimes there was just a half second - on bad days when the summer was at its height and Naruto was sleep-addled or work-tired and he _forgot_ \- when he saw Sasuke's face and something in him _jolted_. When it was startlingly, heartbreakingly hilarious. The idea of Sasuke sleeping next to him, when his _friend_ Sasuke, the one he still missed and mourned, would have gone apoplectic with rage at the idea. But then that half second would pass, and his boyfriend's face would fade back into comfortable familiarity.

Naruto's hand stopped, hovering just over Sasuke's back. On any other day he would have slid his hand down the back of those shorts and waited with a wicked grin for Sasuke - who was such a civilian, still refusing to take Iruka-sensei's classes - to slowly wake. Or maybe he would have let Sasuke wake up their favorite way - hard, long fingers twisted in Naruto's hair, mid-blow-job.

But today was – well.

So Naruto slipped quietly out of bed, dressed, and made his way through the waking streets to the training grounds. Some of them were already in use, but the small field near Training Ground Three stood empty.

Naruto sat down hard, ripping out a handful of grass and throwing it at the Memorial Stone half-heartedly.

"Happy birthday, asshole."

* * *

Sasuke woke alone and unsurprised to be so. He knew where Naruto went on days like this. (And on rainy days, and the anniversary of the other Sasuke's death, and in the weeks after the Chuunin Exams. Any time when the easy cheer on Naruto's face seemed to stretch thin, he would rub the old scar on his chest with one hand, grin an apology, and spent the night alone in a field with an old stone monument.)

It was okay. Naruto was just visiting an old friend.

Still, no reason he had to do it alone, Sasuke thought, pulling clothes on and fumbling with his trainers at the door. A quick traversing of the village brought him past opening street stalls and government buildings, down the familiar path to the training grounds, and toward the sparse trees that surrounded the clearing.

As he drew near, Sasuke didn't try to conceal his footsteps. There was nothing a civilian like him could do to hide his presence from a ninja of Naruto's caliber, and he'd long given up trying.

Naruto was waiting at end of the path, seated cross-legged, the black and red of his coat standing out amidst the grasses.

"Hey."

"Hey." Naruto patted a patch of grass. "Pull up a seat."

That was a first. Hands in his pockets, Sasuke crossed the space between them and sat, trainers digging comfortably into Naruto's thigh and their shoulders brushing.

This was one of the many things they were slowly working through. It made their relationship rocky at times, though the magnetic pull that had drawn them together - and the ridiculously mind-blowing sex - helped balance the scales.

Naruto was still grieving for someone he had loved and lost, and maybe always would be.

Sasuke didn't know what that was like, but apparently Uchiha Sasuke the ninja had lost a brother once too. Apparently Uchiha Sasuke the ninja had handled it... not well.

He tried to imagine Itachi, a shadowy figure, first loving then terrifying. He tried to imagine friends and family lying dead and bloody in the streets. He tried to imagine that level of rage and sorrow, and couldn't.

But here was Naruto, usually too damn sunny by nature, grieving alone for the asshole who'd left him behind.

So Sasuke sat down and said, "Tell me about him."

And Naruto took a great shuddering breath, and started to talk.

* * *

Sasuke awoke to a crash.

That was not in itself unusual. Usually the crash was Naruto throwing the alarm clock through the window or failing to cook something other than cup noodles. Sometimes it was Lee announcing his arrival, or Sakura hastily departing after having opened the door to something she did not want to see.

This was different.

As Sasuke's sleep-fuzzed brain floated into consciousness, he became aware of three things:

1) Naruto was not here, having left in the early morning for a diplomatic mission with Tsunade. 2) There was a hole in the wall big enough to fit a tank, inside which several people were standing and staring at him. 3) He was very naked, having celebrated Naruto's promotion the night before with a lot of alcohol and ridiculously messy, sideways, upside-down sex.

Sitting up very slowly, Sasuke groped for the blanket. Finding it ripped and on the floor, he pulled the topsheet slowly around his waist.

"Uchiha Sasuke?"

The ninja standing in the doorway, he now noticed, were neither people he recognized nor wearing Konoha uniforms. The implications of that, coupled with the truly spectacular hole in the wall, rendered him suddenly awake and sober.

There were intruders in the village. Did they know Naruto was gone? Was this bad timing, or had they been waiting for him to leave? Why had no one noticed and raised the alarm? What if someone had noticed, and they were now lying dead outside -

Sasuke took his thoughts of Sakura, of Neji and Lee and all the people he'd befriended, the people Naruto loved, and pushed them out of his mind. Now was not the time for panic.

"What do you want?" He kept his voice even and very slowly put one bare foot on the floor, hoisting the sheet around his waist. He tried not to think about how un-intimidating he looked with hickies down his neck and thighs. Naruto enjoyed the fucked-out look in the morning, but in front of an enemy it was less than ideal.

"Show it to us."

Probably because he had a death wish, Sasuke cast a slow purposeful glance around the room and said, "Show you what?"

There wasn't much of actual value here, Naruto's standing in the village aside. There was a potted plant, a small television, and a set of dishware decorated with smiling pig faces. Anything of worth was on Naruto's person or under the safekeeping of the Hokage tower.

The ninja frowned. "The Sharingan. If you wish to save yourself, drop this civilian playacting and activate your Bloodline Limit."

For fuck's sake.

"No Sharingan," Sasuke said, tempted to bluff but feeling things would go badly if he lied. "I'm not that guy."

The woman standing next to the leader brought a hand to her temple, veins radiating from her eyes in a way that reminded Sasuke of Neji and Hinata. "He's telling the truth," she said. "His chakra pathways are far too underdeveloped to be the real Uchiha. He's harmless, like they say."

The little company of intruders seemed to relax.

"Then we take him with us as a bargaining chip," said the leader. His voice was dismissive. "Hurry, before the Nine Tails returns."

Sasuke had a sudden vision of himself bound like a maiden in distress as these assholes hauled him into the woods. The entire village of Konoha emptied out to rescue Naruto's helpless boyfriend. The way Kakashi would probably never stop laughing at him when they got back -

Fuck that.

Sasuke's hands came together in a flash of seals - _snake, ram, monkey, boar, horse, tiger -_

The _Katon_ blew his surprised attackers out the door and into the street. They came to a stop in a smoking pile at the feet of a figure clad in orange.

 _Too late,_ Sasuke tried to say. _Naruto's home_. But then his knees buckled and he grasped for purchase on the bed behind him, because apparently making a giant fireball when you were a newborn in the world of ninjutsu took a lot out of you.

"Idiot," he heard Naruto yelling, above the yelps of the intruders as ANBU rounded them up. "Idiot."

"Are the others okay?" Sasuke managed to ask, sinking onto the mattress and holding his head between his knees.

"They're fine, of course they're fine - _fuck_ I was so scared we wouldn't be back in time - how did you - Iruka-sensei said you wouldn't even read the textbooks he gave you!"

"Of course I read the damn textbooks," Sasuke snarled. Now wasn't the time to explain of how many long hours he'd spent on the training grounds with Neji and Sakura. Kakashi may have refused to teach him, but Sasuke had never been helpless in his life, and damned if he was going to start now.

 _Katon_ had come to him first and most easily, even if it made him as weak as a baby. They were all very carefully Not Talking About It.

Naruto huffed a laugh and buried his face in Sasuke's hair. "Do you need anything?"

"Clothes would be good."

There was a pause. "Can I grope your bare ass first?"

* * *

Under a sky filled with fireworks on a late night in August, the Godaime Hokage Tsunade made an official proclamation declaring Naruto Uzumaki her legal heir. Sasuke stood at the back of the crowd and let himself join in the raucous cheering.

"You know what this means," Naruto said later as they walked home through an escort of fireflies.

"No?"

"You have to call me Hokage-sama when we bang."

" _No_."

* * *

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